KnowledgeBase 00120: Entering Mark Characters from the Keyboard

Sometimes it is useful for application developers and system administrators to
be able to include mark characters in data entered from the keyboard. This
facility should not be enabled for end users of an application as it has the
possibility of corrupting data if the application does not apply rigorous
validation of incoming data.

The PTERM MARK Command

Use of

PTERM MARK ON

enables translation of three control characters to the mark characters used
to mark the boundaries between fields, values and subvalues in dynamic arrays.

Ctrl-^

Character 254, Field mark

Ctrl-]

Character 253, Value mark

Ctrl-\

Character 252, Subvalue mark

Use of

PTERM MARK OFF

disables this translation, resulting in

Ctrl-^

Character 30, ASCII RS

Ctrl-]

Character 29, ASCII GS

Ctrl-\

Character 28, ASCII FS

Using the PTERM MARK command without the ON or OFF qualifier displays the
current setting. Mark character translation is off by default.